Demise
by EsotericAnonymity
Summary: Book!AU for some invented backstory. In the undisciplined mind of the artilleryman.


To any sensible fellow, this idealistic, dark eyed dreamer would seem utterly and completely insensible; perhaps even mad, what with all his energetic talk, and the untameable light of his eyes.

No less, he himself has no slight inkling of that truth. Already he hardly can tell the horrid reality all about him from his own dreams, and wonderings of a dismal future. The reality of how unusual and misguided he is goes unknown through his head as he lies here, waiting for restless sleep to come upon him, spine pressed to the remains of a crumbling wall as bottles and mud lie strewn about his feet. All he truthfully knows are the matters of his own mind, and his own individual dreams and hopes for a future of perfection. Little attention does he pay to the slashing cuts over his face and his chest, and how blackened and haggard his face has become. Perhaps it is that everyone's simply become terrified; exhausted and mindless, but it would be difficult to draw to any sort of a conclusion within the extent of his separation from the remainder of humanity. He can't recall his own appearance, nor the practicalities of his physical anguish. To him, it's no longer of importance, nor anything worth paying a moment's thought to amongst the rest of the memories stabbing at the back of his mind.

Yet, even so, there are occasionally strange, fleeting moments when he questions whether or not he's the same man he once was, alone as he now is without the ghost of a companion, and only vague recollections of sullen despair haunting the gentler side of his mind. The madness and delusional arrogance within his speech and his thought has consumed him, taking what purity ever remained in his wretched being. Each passing hour is now one spent with an aching body and charred skin; always paining, throbbing, burning, stirring dim recollections of glowing flames, consuming not only heather and pines but bodies, flesh, and faces he could perhaps consider familiar.

But if he's honest with himself, the only thing he personally and truthfully calls problematic about his circumstance is the fact that for one of few moments in his short life, he feels that perhaps there is a sliver of common humanity within him, and that he is alike to the other six million with their long gone ideals. In the solitude, for once, he's just another human being, not now being looked down on for his work and his rough, sharp tongue; now, he suffers in his own solitary confinement, with deep, red gashes covering his body that will never be stitched up and left clean.

Perhaps it's hardly surprising that he doesn't know who he is, or that he doesn't live with any stable knowledge of reality or the anguish of thousands, writhing in their graves of ash and fire. Perhaps it's nothing extraordinary that he doesn't know that he's just a boy of war; an artilleryman who could so easily be called strange; called unorthodox, maybe, with his ideas reaching far beyond the constraints of reality. His once fresh face is now riddled by the incoherency of despair and the harsh reality of what has befallen him in the short, sudden happenings of the last few harrowing days. Sometimes still, when he clambers out of the cellar at sunset and takes note of the blazing sky and distant flames consuming what earthly life remains, he can for a moment in time remember clearly what happened one terrible month ago, when his regiment was destroyed, naivety burnt away as easily as the wide eyes and bones of his fellows.

Inside him, nothing has changed about the memories themselves, and his bitter recollections. He still shudders, despite how much he tries to forget and move on from the hurt of something so pathetic in his evolved state of mind. He's disgusted at himself for even daring to recall weakness, and feeling that thrum of pain in a heart he's tried to turn cold and unknowing of dreaded sentimentality. Weakness and emotion is something he has grown to despise. No less, regardless of his hatred of it, he still has to secure his resolve and fight back his shameful tears on the lonely nights, his eyes glinting from the depths of a ghostly face and his bloodied body quivering.

There's no bringing them back. There's no point trying.

Yet, no one else would understand that. No one witnessed and survived that attack on Horsell Common, after all – they're all dead, now, and it's hardly easy to draw truth from this man when he can hardly cope with it, himself. On the outside, it's near impossible for the common man to see what lies beneath the scars and cuts, even if this artilleryman succeeds in appearing to be a person of simple matters at first because of how ordinary he presents himself to be, within all the chaos and all the destruction the Martians have wrought. He's hopeless in the stretch of his dreams, yet somehow so strangely brilliant, beyond the boundary of his social standing; he being much taken to matters of the logical mind and courageous, boyish idealisms.

It's a strange thing that, even so, he can't quite bring himself to think it a pity that the earth is steadily falling to pieces. In the end, perhaps the fact society has liquidised and so swiftly been destroyed and crumbled away is hardly something worth reminiscing over, at least fondly. People are equal, and men are men. There is nothing regrettable about a world dying when, after all, he knows the only true thing it has done is paved the way for something greater.

But it would be futile for any other self-respecting fellow to attempt to describe him, and all that he considers worth his own thought. How can it be that he is so excitable, so charismatic, so assuring in his nature, having such conviction and belief in a future any other decent minded person would view only as repulsive? This self-centred thinker, so passionate in his wild and free extravagance, is not even remotely sensible in his ways, nor definable in any sense of the word. To place him in some sort of strict generalisation would be pointless and altogether impossible.

Dark haired and dark eyed, his spoken words are of the streets he was raised upon – gravelly and hoarse, constructed of gas-lit recollections and the coarse lilt of a boy who once wandered London's paths with abandon. Yet, perhaps somewhere past the dark picture of this thin face and leathery skin lies features that may have once been called handsome, long ago, and still remain as a softly ringing reminder of his so swiftly destroyed humanity and his youth, and of what he may once have been before the war, before all the destruction of this hopeless battle. He has not always been this lost being, made of self-glory and undisciplined thought, after all. He has not always been mad, with his lust for survival and his haunted nightmares when night has fallen and all is still.

He is a surprisingly young man, being hardly yet a fellow of twenty-five; occasionally this is evident in his speech and in his thought, accentuating the presence of childhood ideals that still linger deep within his mind, being unhindered even after years spent far from home. Sometimes when looking at him, it's easy enough to allow one's mind to wonder to what he might have been a handful of years ago, before all innocence was crushed and normality burned to ashes. After all, might he well have once been a child of his father's pride, and the son of the sort of mother who treasured these fine eyes, and this nimble mind? Might he have been the son that the parents cherished and always spoke of when given the chance, boasting so readily of his clever head and able hands? May he have once been the boy a mother would have cried for once he left for the artillery with a noble heart and a mind filled with the beauteous prospects of glorified war?

After all, he's just a man of guns and steel now.

Is he in the artillery? Does he have his own gun? Certainly, it would seem.

But then, one wonders, where might his regiment be?

Dead, one could suppose, if only they could manage to extract a scrap of sense from this man, reaching past his ever present rage and mental torment.

He's prejudiced. Passionate. Resentful. Impractical. Selfish.

Misled.

But what no one – least of all himself - will ever completely realise is the truth of how broken his conscience has become, and how many pieces of a once resourceful mind have been scattered across the blood-red ruins of this formidable, lurid landscape.

Nothing has changed over the long, unearthly days. It's been a never-ending cycle of the sight of bodies, from the very moment the Martians crawled beyond their pit; mangled human forms so unceremoniously thrown over one another with their skin turned grey by the Heat Ray and their eyes so wild, and so _terrified_.

Heaven knows, perhaps it's the trauma. Maybe it's the trauma of seeing such rampant destruction and all the suddenness of this devouring Hell on Earth that's changed him from the once resourceful fellow he used to be, to an excitable boy, preoccupied with his childish dreams of a perfect world for playing nothing but grotesque, frivolous games. Maybe it's the trauma that's created this shift of time, taking him from one battlefield into another by the forces of a fate he doesn't understand. Maybe it's the trauma that's drained him of not his blood, but all the compassion he may have once considered particular to human hearts, and his love for a life consisting of more than cold, brutal science; rules and regulations. Maybe it's the war that's made him so irredeemably resentful, and hating of this dead human society for their prejudice and ignorance.

Perhaps it's the memories of all the murder and the wreckage, and the plain realisation of how much he's lost in such a short space of time. The witness of death, of fire and of living Hell has been the knife in his heart, and there is no chance of heavenly redemption in this place he still doesn't dare to call a living, breathing war.

There's nothing anyone will do to help him now.

There's nothing anyone _can _do.

In any case, there's simply so little that anyone knows, or that anyone cares, when it comes to matters beyond their own petty survival in this broken world. He is nothing like them, nothing like humanity. He never had a scrap of relation to them, and all their kind.

But what great man is this lonesome boy now? What pride is he to any living human being? Here he lies; drunk on his dreams and his champagne, and hopelessly alone - a hypocrite drowned in the river of his own Utopia, and yet still a man so courageous and optimistic in his forged, grim prospects of a life ahead – a life only he can see, and only _he_ can envisage in the fractured crevices of his mind.

He wants to believe his own lies, certainly. He's glad enough if anyone will pay him a moment's notice, and realise the wondrous grandeur of his plans, despite the fact that it is nothing but one great, mocking game in which ultimately he and he alone will be the glorified victor. He talks so contemptuously towards those foolish Londoners, yet will seize companionship when he can take it, selectively choosing the ones who will live and who will die. He's desperate beyond his own belief, and wanting. He'll drink a toast to anyone with a strong enough resolve; maybe speak to them in that intoxicating tone of his, and greet their praises with shining eyes.

There is no insanity, no slim trace of madness in his speech, but in his thought and his action. He smiles only for another's humouring presence, and the feeling of a wineglass between his fingers; angers only for the stupidity, and the idiocy of those he knows are already condemned to die.

Perhaps he has a right to hate, when never has the world offered him a single kindness. He has never offered _himself_ a single kindness, when the only bitter, laughing tribute to his wishes and dreams is a hole in the ground.

Lord knows, maybe he should have simply remained in London all those years ago, and courted the pretty vicar's daughter; maybe then he would be safely away in Belgium, rather than languishing here in his anger and cold, pragmatic living; a deranged, lost boy, with transparent dreams and a mind that still cares for the practice of games and careful regards on how best to place chess pieces on a scratched board. He's long forgotten what it feels like to be embraced and tenderly cradled, and not be despised for the single fact that he's simply another soldier in one great social body – scoffed at because he's supposedly a simple minded fool who drinks his life away and gambles with the others, speaking lazily and loosely and dropping his consonants.

But would things have been different if he'd been a changed man, instead of the lone boy, ignorant of a happier childhood and the now forgotten, soft-eyed embraces of a mother? Could it be that he may have been a different person, had he not run away to the artillery at the tender age of seventeen; spurred on by thin lies and the want of meaning? Would things have been different if he'd not been the only one to live, and the only one to witness the devouring fire of an invasion he still doesn't understand?

Yet now he's lost his humanity, all his feeling for a world of creation and beauty; all emotion dulled by his hatred and by the drugs constantly eating away at his mind - falsely soothing, and so distracting. He no longer possesses even a scrap of tenderness, or any will to care. He has no need to care, when his fingers are so numb he can scarcely hold them still long enough to light another cigar or prise open the next bottle of champagne, or even press them to his temples to assure himself he's still alive.

His survival is all that matters now.

_He_ has to be the strong one, and the noticeable one that people will look to and drink to when the darkness comes in the evening, and the dying have retreated to London to gulp down their last toast to glory.

Compassion is dead. There'll be no need for sympathy in his new world, and no need for tenderness.

How can a man in his right mind ever truthfully feel tenderness for such a cold, heartless civilisation, anyhow? What are these silly beasts - these brainless survivors of humanity - but stupid, mindless animals, waiting for the slaughter? What is he but their noble, exiled leader - their Napoleon and their saviour, with his plans for a new restoration?

The old way of doing things no longer has any place in his thoughts. There's nothing but the future there – and if he can reach it, then he knows the world will finally be faultless, without any foolish pity.

And surely, there could be no more useless thing than still having a heart.


End file.
